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For those Americans who know anything at all about the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the story line seems simple, dramatic, inspiring and familiar:<\/p>\n
Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in \u201cThe Roaring Twenties,\u201d leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while the Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation. Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words (\u201cthe only thing we have to fear is fear itself\u201d) and a flurry of radical reform in his first hundred days in office. While conservatives squealed, this \u201cnew deal for the American people\u201d improved the lives of everyone and got the economy humming again \u2013 just in time to face the challenges of World War II. No wonder a grateful nation rewarded Franklin Roosevelt with an unprecedented four terms \u2013 and a consistent ranking as one of our three greatest presidents (along with Washington and Lincoln).<\/p>\n
Comedian Al Franken greets supporters after he spoke at a rally at the St. Louis Park Junior High School in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, March 3, 2007. Franken attended the school as a youth. He is seeking the 2008 Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from Minnesota. REUTERS\/Eric Miller (UNITED STATES)<\/p>\n
Like most other Americans of my generation, I learned this story from my parents and grandparents, not just from history teachers in school. My grandparents on my father\u2019s side, immigrants from Ukraine, became naturalized citizens in part to vote for Roosevelt: in their tiny home in a gritty neighborhood of South Philadelphia, they always kept a heroic black-and-sepia portrait of FDR over the mantelpiece, encased in a dime-store brass frame with a cracked pane of glass. My grandfather was a barrel-maker who managed to keep working throughout the Depression, so he never benefited personally from New Deal programs, but he revered the 32nd President for his general support for \u201cthe little guy.\u201d My father recalled April 12, 1945, the day of Roosevelt\u2019s sudden and shocking death from a cerebral hemorrhage, as one of the darkest occasions of his life: along with many other sailors at his base in San Francisco, he wept uncontrollably.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the nearly universal canonization of Franklin Roosevelt has helped all succeeding generations learn false lessons about the right way to deal with hard times and poverty. These assumptions continue to shape political debate, especially at moments like the present day when some three-quarters of the people (according to recent polls) feel convinced that the economy\u2019s in recession or headed in that direction. Democrats in particular love to invoke the Depression and summon the noble ghost of FDR: some 40 years after his death, Barbra Streisand thrilled a party fundraiser with her heart-wrenching rendition of Roosevelt\u2019s campaign song, \u201cHappy Days are Here Again,\u201d which suggested that in the right hands, enlightened government could stop suffering and uplift the downtrodden. In the same spirit, in 1992, Bill Clinton declared that the first President Bush had left the nation with \u201cthe worst economy since the Great Depression\u201d and in his First Inaugural Address suggested that even in the midst of January\u2019s chill he meant to \u201cforce the spring.\u201d In 2004, numerous Democratic candidates (Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry) made similar analogies between the presumed economic wreckage left by George W. Bush and the dark days of 1932, and we\u2019ll undoubtedly hear similar alarmist rhetoric in 2008. In response to the presumed economic disasters and hardships which they always discern, liberals instinctively invoke FDR\u2019s stirring words from his First Inaugural: \u201cThis nation asks for action, and action now.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the conventional wisdom, Roosevelt proved that such governmental action \u2013 bold, aggressive, experimental, and sweeping \u2013 restored vigor to the economy and improved the lives of the suffering masses.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, such assumptions rest upon a foundation of myths, distortions, half-truths and outright lies. The truths about the New Deal, and all other notable attempts in the course of American history to use the power of the federal government to rescue the poor over the course of 230 years of American history, show the same disturbing results: higher tax burdens and a corresponding loss of liberty, with little gain (and sometimes serious damage) for the intended beneficiaries of bureaucratic largesse.<\/p>\n
An understanding of this destructive and increasingly dangerous pattern in our politics must begin with an examination of the pernicious legend of Franklin Roosevelt as America\u2019s savior.<\/p>\n
1. THE NEW DEAL NEVER BROUGHT RECOVERY \u2013 IN FACT, IT PROLONGED THE DEPRESSION<\/p>\n
In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the great depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, the national unemployment rate stood at 17.4%. Seven years later, after more than five years of FDR and literally hundreds of wildly ambitious new government programs, after more than doubling federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at — 17.4%! As economist Jim Powell, author of the devastating book \u201cFDR\u2019s Folly\u201d points out: \u201cFrom 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2%. At no point during the 1930\u2019s did unemployment go below 14%. Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9% of American workers were unemployed. Living standards remained depressed until after the war.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his celebrated Inaugural Address of March 4, 1933, FDR unequivocally declared: \u201cOur greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.\u201d For the President and his economic planners, the task of putting people to work did remain an unsolvable problem \u2013until world conflict led to sixteen million Americans leaving the work force for the military, and others finding new jobs in humming defense plants. Considering Roosevelt\u2019s self-proclaimed priorities, the persistence of devastating unemployment rates (in an era when the typical family relied on only one wage earner and women for the most part remained uninvolved in the work force) should alone identify the New Deal as a wretched, ill-conceived failure. Other measures of recovery show similarly dismal results. After the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 250 in 1930 under Hoover (it had been 343 just before the crash). By January, 1940 the market had collapsed to 151 (remaining in the low 100\u2019s through most of Roosevelt\u2019s terms) and didn\u2019t return to its 1929 levels until the 1950\u2019s. At the same time, federal spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product soared at an unprecedented rate: from 2.5% in 1929, to 9% in 1936 (long before the wartime spending began). In other words, the portion of the total economy controlled by Washington increased by a staggering 360% in the course of just seven years \u2013 without providing discernable benefit to the economy.<\/p>\n
Such statistics look so disturbing, so incontrovertible, that they raise serious questions about the survival of the New-Deal-Fixed-the-Depression myth. How could reputable historians pretend that the vast expansion of government power between 1933 and 1941 somehow brought the nation out its persistent, nightmarish hard times?<\/p>\n
Out of curiosity, I took from my shelf the college history textbook assigned to me at Yale in 1968. The relevant chapters had been written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the most acclaimed and authoritative of all New Deal historians. To my surprise, not even this fervent liberal and stalwart admirer of FDR attempted to pretend that his hero\u2019s policies had solved the Depression. In \u201cThe National Experience,\u201d published in 1963 (just 18 years after FDR\u2019s death), Schlesinger wrote: \u201cThough the policies of the Hundred Days had ended despair, they had not produced recovery\u2026The New Deal had done remarkable things, especially in social reform, but the formula for full recovery evidently still eluded it.\u201d He also wrote honestly about the devastating crash of 1937 \u2013 in the midst of \u201cthe Second New Deal\u201d and Roosevelt\u2019s second term. \u201cThe collapse in the months after September 1937 was actually more severe than it had been in the first nine months of the depression (or, indeed, than in any other period in American history for which statistics are available). National income fell 13 per cent, payrolls 35 per cent, durable goods production 50 per cent, profits 78 per cent. The increase in unemployment reproduced scenes of the early depression and imposed new burdens on the relief agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the view of such acknowledged economic disaster after more than five years of vaunted reform, how can fawning historians still worship at the altar of Rooseveltian idolatry? Normal depressions or recessions last between one to three years; the Great Depression continued to depress living standards and impose severe hardships for more than a decade. A growing majority of economic historians now concede that the programs of the New Deal prolonged, rather than terminated, the Depression. David Kennedy, the former President of Stanford University, wrote a 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning account called Freedom from Fear in which he concluded: \u201cWhatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.\u201d In nearly all European nations, afflicted by the worldwide economic crisis as was the United States, the depression ended more quickly than it did in Roosevelt\u2019s America; in the words of economic historian Lester V. Chandler, \u201cin most countries the depression was less deep and prolonged.\u201d Even at the time, experts understood the misguided nature of FDR\u2019s policies. In 1935, the Brookings Institution (then, as now, a left-leaning think tank) produced a 900-page report considering the impact of the New Deal\u2019s most ambitious and controversial program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and concluded, \u201con the whole it retarded recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n
To counter the brute facts about the persistence of crippling unemployment and pervasive poverty in the face of the huge increases in governmental spending and activism, New Deal apologists cite two positive results from the feverish emergence of new programs: the restoration of \u201chope\u201d in place of despair, and the implementation of needed \u201creforms\u201d that planted the long-term seeds of justice even if they failed to bring economic recovery.<\/p>\n
Concerning the notion of FDR\u2019s alleged conquest of fear, Amity Shlaes (in her brilliant history of the Great Depression \u201cThe Forgotten Man\u201d) points out that he achieved this change of mood through an old-fashioned vote-buying scheme in the style of the venal ward-heelers and big city bosses who still dominated the Democratic Party. She cites the nakedly political emphasis on the PWA, or Public Works Administration, under the control of Secretary of the Interior Harold I. Ickes. This federal operation laid the groundwork for the current Washington mania for \u201cearmarks\u201d \u2013in which Congressional power-brokers arrange for buildings, bridges, and other facilities to gratify constituents across the country. With more than 3,000 counties in America, the PWA provided at least one project for all but 33 of them. The scale of spending startled even the responsible parties: with $3 billion in its first few years, at a time when the total federal budget in any given year was barely $6 billion. Secretary Ickes himself wrote concerning the expenditure for his program, \u201cIt helped me to estimate its size by figuring that if we had it all in currency and should load it into trucks, we could set out with it from Washington, D.C., for the Pacific Coast, shovel off one million dollars at every milepost and, at the end, still have enough left to build a fleet of battle ships.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other defense of Roosevelt\u2019s programs, beyond their success in brightening the national mood (and insuring his perpetual re-election) involves their inherent justice: Schlesinger and others suggest that even if the reforms failed to bring the promised recovery, their inherent \u201cjustice\u201d (concerning the empowerment of labor unions, the regimentation of agriculture under federal control, tighter supervision of banking, and countless other \u201cimprovements\u201d) made them nonetheless worthwhile. Regarding this argument, no less a leftist hero than the British economist John Maynard Keynes offered a tart response. He wrote FDR a letter published on December 31, 1933 in the New York Times in which he warned that \u201ceven wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, he perceived at the very beginning of the New Deal its most damaging aspect: treating the nation\u2019s capitalists as an enemy –\u201cthe unscrupulous money changers\u201d FDR called them in his inaugural, who \u201chave fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.\u201d With new, unpredictable government regulatory schemes and law suits and political attacks emerging every week, business leaders found it difficult to prepare the long term planning that alone could restore investment and entrepreneurial energy and put Americans back to work.<\/p>\n
2. MAJOR RECESSIONS \u2013 BOTH BEFORE AND SINCE FDR \u2013 HAVE ENDED MORE QUICKLY WITHOUT MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION<\/p>\n
The Great Depression hardly constituted the only economic collapse in US history. The nation endured major reverses and sharply increased unemployment in 1815, 1837, 1873, 1893, 1920, 1958, 1979 and many other occasions. The record shows consistently that leaders who cut government to revive the economy succeeded far more quickly and painlessly than the New Deal.<\/p>\n
The punishing Panic of 1837 wrought havoc for American commerce and cost President Martin Van Buren his chances of re-election in 1840, but Jim Powell points out that Van Buren responded in precisely the appropriate way: he cut federal spending from $37.2 million to $24.3 million and sharply reduced taxes (mainly tariff revenue). He determined \u201cto make government cheaper and stay out of the way of the private sector.\u201d As a result, the young nation roared back to recovery and resumed its spectacular economic growth shortly after Van Buren left office.<\/p>\n
Another serious downturn, the Depression of 1893, produced four million unemployed, violent strikes and a colorful march on Washington by the dispossessed of \u201cCoxey\u2019s Commonweal Army\u201d who marched en masse from Ohio behind a banner with an image of Christ and the legend \u201cHE IS RISEN!! BUT DEATH TO INTEREST ON BONDS!!!\u201d The marchers demanded interest free advances from the government and a new program to hire the legions of unemployed to build highways across America, but the Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, refused to see them or to consider their pleas. Instead, he determined to reduce burdens on taxpayers, cutting tariffs and blocking an income tax. He even vetoed a bill (among more than 300 \u201crelief\u201d measures he stopped) to distribute $10,000 in seed grain to drought-stricken Texas farmers. In his veto message, the President wrote: \u201cFederal aid in such cases encourages an expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.\u201d By the end of 1894, depressed income figures began to turn upward and the entire depression ended within two years.<\/p>\n
Most striking of all, the reviled President Warren Harding proved himself a masterful manager of the sharp recession that followed the conclusion of World War I and which he faced when he came to power in 1921. Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman identified the decline of the money supply \u201cas the largest percentage decline\u201d up to that time, and the largest in American history other than the Great Depression. As the great British historian Paul Johnson (\u201cA History of the American People\u201d) writes: \u201cHarding inherited from the comatose Wilson regime one of the sharpest recessions in American history.” By July, 1921 it was all over, and the economy was booming again. Harding and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon had done nothing except cut government expenditure by a huge 40 percent from Wilson\u2019s peacetime level, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it \u2018our last natural recovery to full employment.\u2019 The cuts were not ill-considered but part of a careful plan to bring the spending of the monster state which had emerged under Wilson back under control. The result of these cuts, and of even sharper tax cuts under Harding\u2019s successor Coolidge, was the long period of growth and rising living standards associated with the \u201cRoaring Twenties,\u201d interrupted only by the prolonged Depression made worse by governmental meddling by both Hoover and Roosevelt.<\/p>\n
Reagan enjoyed similar success by cutting taxes dramatically to cope with the crippling and stubborn Carter legacy of \u201cstagflation,\u201d and Eisenhower and both Presidents Bush managed to make other recessions short-lived without ambitious new government programs. Rather than depending on government programs to cushion us from the impact of inevitable economic downturns, the American people have benefited far more reliably by the proper instinct to cut government and stimulate the economy in times of slow or negative growth.<\/p>\n
3. THE MOST CELEBRATED ADVOCATES FOR THE POOR IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY CALLED FOR LESS GOVERNMENT, NOT MORE<\/p>\n
The Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson, which evolved into the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson (hence the \u201cJefferson-Jackson Dinners\u201d that today\u2019s Democrats still celebrate) argued for less government involvement in the economy, not more. Their opponents, Federalists and later Whigs, favored a more activist government that would assist business interests in building prosperity. For more than a hundred years, the chief intrusion of government policy into economic activity involved tariffs and other restrictions on free trade— generally supported by Federalists, Whigs and later Republicans \u2013 designed to benefit business interests even while increasing costs for the consumer. At least through President Cleveland (who left office in 1897) the Democrats, who claimed as they do now to represent the \u201cworking man\u201d and \u201cthe little guy\u201d favored small government, low taxes, low tariffs and the disentanglement of business from bureaucracy as the best way to assure that ordinary citizens escaped the destructive impact of governmental favoritism for big business.<\/p>\n
4. THE ERA OF SMALL GOVERNMENT PROVIDED GREATER, NOT LESSER, ECONOMIC MOBILITY<\/p>\n
Despite the absence of federal programs to \u201chelp\u201d the poor and downtrodden, the nineteenth century in America remained an unprecedented era of social and economic mobility. The Horatio Alger stories that became bestsellers and inspired the nation reflected reality, and the unprecedented ability of American families (including those of newly arrived immigrant masses) to rise from abject poverty to middle class status (or above) in one, two or three generations. Social programs didn\u2019t power this escalator to prosperity: economic growth did. In their 1963 book \u201cA Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,\u201d Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz write: \u201cThe final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a growth of population of over 2 percent per year, rapid extension of the railroad network, essential completion of continental settlement, and an extraordinary increase both in the acreage of land in farms and the output of farm products. The number of farms rose by nearly 50 per cent \u2013 despite the price decline. Yet at the same time, manufacturing industries were growing even more rapidly, and the Census of 1890 was the first in which the net value added by manufacturing exceeded the value of agricultural output. A feverish boom in western land swept the country during the eighties.\u201d Meanwhile, with government consuming a smaller portion of the Gross Domestic Product than other industrial powers (Britain, Germany, France) the United States emerged as the most open and mobile society on earth, providing opportunities for the penniless that more bureaucratic nations couldn\u2019t match.<\/p>\n
5. ANTI-POVERTY AND GREAT SOCIETY PROGRAMS OF THE \u201860\u2019S AND \u201870\u2019S WORSENED, RATHER THAN IMPROVED, THE STATUS OF THE POOR<\/p>\n
As Ronald Reagan famously declared, \u201cWe had a war on poverty. And poverty won.\u201d Charles Murray\u2019s ground-breaking 1984 book \u201cLosing Ground\u201d asks an obvious question about the era of the \u201cGreat Society\u201d and its aftermath: what caused the obvious and painful increase in poverty, illegitimacy, crime and social dysfunction at the same time that government spending to address these pathologies vastly increased? He concluded that the well-intentioned and monumentally expensive programs of the period contributed to the problems, rather than to their solutions.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, the programs of the Great Society went far beyond the New Deal in erasing the distinction between the \u201cdeserving poor\u201d and the \u201cundeserving poor\u201d\u2014making all struggling citizens eligible for the same programs, regardless of the respectability or destructiveness of their behavior. This approach stemmed from the assumption that the poor bore no responsibility for their status \u2013 creating a culture of helpless victimhood and presumed powerlessness that undermined the confidence and self-discipline needed to escape poverty. An individual who bears no responsibility for his situation exerts no control over it \u2013 and must depend on outside forces (in this case the federal government) for his redemption. By removing the stigma previously associated with accepting \u201cthe dole,\u201d anti-poverty programs encouraged a culture of dependency and discouraged self-reliance. The very concept of \u201cWelfare Rights\u201d (eagerly promoted in the 1970\u2019s) worked against the old idea that the \u201chonest poor\u201d who refused hand-outs and insisted on toiling for their own advancement deserved special respect and encouragement.<\/p>\n
The ultimate vindication for Murray\u2019s arguments came with federal welfare reform in 1996 which succeeded in cutting the number of dependent individuals by more than half and corresponded with a period or rapidly declining poverty.<\/p>\n
6. GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS CROWD OUT THE MORE EFFECTIVE WORK OF PRIVATE CHARITY<\/p>\n
A paper by Daniel Hungerman of the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrates the precipitous decline in church-based private charity to benefit the needy as government aid expenditures increased more than six-fold from 1933 to 1939. In \u201cFaith-Based Charity and Crowd Out During the Great Depression\u201d he shows that in 1926, congregations invested vastly more ($150 million) on these charities than federal, state and local agencies combined ($60 million at most). With the rise in New Deal expenditures, each dollar of government-relief spending in a state led to between three-and-seven cents less church spending. Since overall federal investment dwarfed the charitable investment (by a ratio of more than 10 to 1) this meant a significant reduction \u2013 an estimated 30% — in the amount devoted by churches to helping the poor.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Tragedy of American Compassion\u201d (1992), Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas explores numerous reasons that private charities function more effectively to uplift the poor. For instance, \u201cA century ago, when individuals applied for material assistance, charity volunteers tried first to \u2018restore family ties that have been sundered\u2019 and \u2018reabsorb in social life those who for some reason have snapped the threads that bound them to other members of the community.\u2019 Instead of immediately offering help, charities asked, \u2018Who is bound to help in this case?\u201d This approach of course discouraged the extension of poverty as a semi-permanent status passed on from one generation to another. As Olasky maintains, faith-based and private aid organizations also maintained the crucial ability to make distinctions between \u201cdeserving\u201d and \u201cself-destructive\u201d poor. \u201cCharities a century ago realized that two persons in exactly the same material circumstances, but with different values, need different treatment. One might benefit most from some material help and a pat on the back, the other might need spiritual challenge and a push.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the great difficulties of all bureaucratized and governmental interventions, no matter how well intentioned, is the official difficulty in making such distinctions, or helping to repair or encourage the family relationships so essential to escape from poverty and dysfunction.<\/p>\n
7. NOSTALGIA AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS CLOUD CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE RECENT PAST<\/p>\n
With rapid upward mobility still a prominent factor in American life, many families feel proud to exaggerate their own past destitution and somehow prefer to identify government as the source of their progress rather than business. A few years ago I saw this principle at work when speaking to a Jewish Temple in Florida. An angry questioner denounced my conservative politics by insisting that Jews in America owed our prosperity exclusively to liberal programs: were it not for the unions and the radical organizers and for the leftists and their compassionate initiatives, we\u2019d all still be toiling in sweat shops and living in tenements. In response to his impassioned declaration, I asked for a show of hands in the crowd of some 700 people. I asked how many came from families in which labor unions played an important role in economic advancement. A few hands shot up, proudly\u2014at most two or three dozen. Then I asked how many people in the audience came from families who had arrived in the middle class because of federal welfare programs. Members of the crowd looked at one another nervously, but only three people raised their hands in the entire Temple. Finally, I asked the most telling question: how many in that crowd had come to their current state of comfort and opportunity because someone, a parent or a grandparent or the individual himself, had worked hard in business and achieved some measure of success? At this, the overwhelming majority of the audience lifted hands, laughed and applauded in recognition.<\/p>\n
Whether the crowd happened to be Jewish, or Irish, or Italian, or Mexican-American, or black, the response wouldn\u2019t have been much different. The vast expansion of the Middle Class that occurred in the 1950\u2019s involved productive work in the private sector and only one prominent form of governmental assistance: the GI Bill, which helped countless veterans (like my father) pay for education and housing and the launching of businesses. The GI Bill \u2013 providing long-term reward for military service \u2013 hardly constituted a something-for-nothing welfare program.<\/p>\n
America has always been a compassionate society, finding various means \u2013 mostly private but occasionally involving state and local funds \u2013 to provide help to those who required it. \u201cRugged individualism\u201d never meant isolation from neighbors, family, or fellow congregants. In that context, attempts by left-leaning commentators to credit government alone for social and economic progress remain strained and unpersuasive.<\/p>\n
Consider, for example, the argument offered by comedian, talk-show host and Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken concerning his wife, Franni. In his stump speeches, he often re-tells \u201cFranni\u2019s Story\u201d in these terms:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen she was seventeen months old, her dad \u2013 a decorated veteran of World War II \u2013 died in a car accident, leaving her mother, my mother-in-law, widowed with five kids.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother-in-law worked in the produce department of a grocery store, but that family made it because of Social Security survivor benefits….Every single one of the four girls in Franni\u2019s family went to college, thanks to Pell Grants and other scholarships\u2026 And my mother-in-law got herself a $300 GI loan to fix her roof, and used the money instead to go the University of Maine. She became a grade school teacher, teaching Title One kids- poor kids- so her loan was forgiven. \u201cMy mother-in-law and every single one of those five kids became a productive member of society. Conservatives like to say that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps \u2013 and that\u2019s a great idea. But first, you\u2019ve got to have the boots. And the government gave my wife\u2019s family the boots.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a moving tale, but it\u2019s hard to believe that without federal programs Franni\u2019s family, with its obvious motivation and intelligence, would have found no way to become \u201cproductive members of society.\u201d Especially as the survivors of a decorated veteran, assistance would have been available \u2013 if not through the VA, then certainly through local or private agencies. Would the University of Maine truly (or properly?) deny scholarship aid to a widow of a war hero who\u2019s trying to raise five kids? The recent e-bay auction of an angry Senatorial letter to Rush Limbaugh has now raised more than four million dollars (with Limbaugh\u2019s matching contribution) for a private charity that provides scholarships for the children of fallen warriors in the Marines and in law enforcement. This prominent story should serve as a reminder that acts of kindness, decency and generosity are hardly limited to the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
—————————————————————-<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the problem with the underlying assumption that the poor can only advance in this nation with the assistance of the federal government: it not only dismisses (and undermines) the self-help potential of the needy, but ignores all those other sources of assistance beyond the Beltway.<\/p>\n
In this sense, it\u2019s instructive to go back one last time to Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s First Inaugural Address. Everyone recalls its reassuring opening: \u201cThis great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself\u2026\u201d Unfortunately, the rest of the speech includes chilling language reminiscent of the Fascist dictatorships simultaneously taking shape in Europe. \u201c\u2026.if we are to go forward,\u201d the new President declared, \u201cwe must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n
Was the audience at this point supposed to raise arms and shout \u201cSieg Heil\u201d?<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this pledge taken,\u201d FDR continued, \u201cI assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack on our common problems\u2026It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is it any wonder that conservatives gravely feared a grievous suspension of Constitutional rule?<\/p>\n
Roosevelt baldly announced: \u201cI shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis \u2013 broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.\u201d<\/p>\n
In giving some indication just how he might employ that power, Roosevelt spoke (in the speech\u2019s single most shocking (and altogether forgotten) passage of the need for a relocation program that might have pleased Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot: \u201cHand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the New Deal never included a new alphabet agency to correct \u201cthe overbalance of population in our industrial centers\u201d by driving people by bayonet into the country, but the mere suggestion illuminates the mentality behind FDR\u2019s initiatives and all other sweeping liberal \u201creforms\u201d over the years.<\/p>\n
Under this thinking, the government and its planners make the crucial economic decisions for the people they command — the enlisted men in the \u201ctrained and loyal army\u201d who are \u201cwilling to submit our lives and property to such discipline.\u201d The very idea that bureaucrats and politicos can direct economic advancement more reliably than individuals making millions of small decisions for themselves has not only reduced liberty, but invariably threatened prosperity in the process.<\/p>\n
Compiled from a Michaael Medved Article For those Americans who know anything at all about the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal,…<\/p>\n